I open my eyes to white blindness. My second eyelids flash across my eyes as they slowly adjust to the vague, less bright areas of the room. I’m lying on my back on a gurney, an intravenous line draping down to my arm. The room has a counter and sink along one wall, all white. There is a white door in the opposite wall. I slowly sit up and swing my legs over the side. Everything feels okay, mentally going down a checklist of body parts. I can feel the electricity buzzing through the room, though I can’t see any monitors. There must be something here, I know there are cameras everywhere in this building. I have been watched for my entire life and know the feel of having electronic eyes on me at all times.

Outwardly I show no emotion, though I’m seething inside. I do not mind so much when they take me to testing when I am awake, but taking me while I sleep and wake me up in the blank room makes me very angry. The first few times that they did this, I did not care so much, but as it began happening more and more, it started making me angrier and angrier. As soon as they see that I am awake, someone will be in to explain what is happening. Another test, they will say, or I needed more vitamins. They never tell me the truth. I keep my secrets, things that they will never know until I want them to. To them, I am just another experiment that had moderate success. They do not know just how much of a success it really was.

The door opens and a technician in a white lab coat comes in. So much white everywhere annoys me and I can feel the beginnings of a headache. I look the technician in the face, but he avoids my gaze. He must be new here, I don’t recognize his face or his smell. From one of the cabinets, he takes out gauze pads, and comes back to remove the intravenous drip. He does not say a word, but I can sense he is excessively nervous.

He finishes up with me, putting a bandage on my arm. I press down hard on the gauze and bend my elbow, holding it up above my head. This usually makes the needle hole stop bleeding faster. Walking out to the hallway, he stands there waiting. Obediently I follow and he leads me back to my room. I am too tired to try to look into his mind, it is almost all that I can do to put one foot in front of the other. I wasn't sure what they had done to me this time, but I would have to wait until I got back to the semi-privacy of my own room.

The building that I live in houses the geneticists and transgenics laboratories. The others are for the kinetics studies, nuclear physics and pharmaceuticals. I have never actually seen these other labs, I can only see them through other people’s eyes. That is one of the skills I have kept to myself. I don’t remember when it was that I began to be so suspicious of the people here, it has only been recently that some of the others in my group have disappeared. I keep my curiosity to myself though, I am perfectly docile when they are watching me.